Kester Brewin

[ Lock In [1] ]  [ Lock In [2] ] [ Lock In [3] ]

Our interaction with technologies does have an effect on our personhood. While we may not be gadgets, our tool-use is actually an important part of our personhood. It is one of the things that makes us human.

The danger that Jaron Lanier identifies in his book is actually one of lock-in: because we are tool-users, any tool manufacturer who writes the code that becomes dominant (iTunes / iPod / HTML / MIDI) is going to exert excessive leverage on us as people, and potentially restrict the human part of tool use: being creative. If Apple make a piano that only plays half the octave, that changes the sort of music we produce.

Lanier notes:

The future of religion will be determined by the quirks of the software that gets locked in during the coming decades, just like the futures of musical notes and personhood.

I think this is really interesting, but Lanier doesn’t actually mine the point he’s beginning. Religion – the bindings that we commit to – is an example of lock-in too. It is a codification of life, a set of boundaries, and as such it must, like all technologies, continue to submit to examination: is this increasing our humanity, our potential as created/creative people?

Take preaching as an example. I’ve heard plenty of people preach about preaching, expound theologically on why preaching is the right thing to do. For me, it’s lock in. It’s a set of railway tracks that most churches simply don’t know how to get away from. One of the things that I remember being told repeatedly in classes for my engineering degree was this:

If the people who built the railroads in the US were really interested in transporting people, they’d now own the airlines. But they don’t.

Why not? Because they got locked in. It became about the vehicle, not the journey. The future of the church, and of religion in general, will be dependent on those who are prepared to see the lock ins, and break out of them. Why? Because that’s where humanity lies: beyond the ripped curtain, past the stone door, outside the Temple courts and into the margins.

Little aside before I get back to the series… We may not be gadgets, but when we coordinate beautifully with machines, the results can be stunning. Just love this!

[ Lock In [1] ]  [ Lock In [2] ]

Finally got my hands on Lanier’s book. Been devouring it like a good doughnut.

In the last post I explained how Sartre sets up this paradox: we are what we are, but precisely part of our being is that we are not simply what we are.

Having got some way into the book, it’s clear that this paradox vexes Lanier too. “What is a person?” he asks.

If I knew the answer to that, I might be able to program an artificial person in a computer. But I can’t. Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.

Just a few paragraphs later though, he admits that:

technologists ‘make up extensions to our being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience…

In other words, I am not a gadget. But my gadgets do recreate who I am. It’s not called the iPod for nothing…

The troubling thing about this paradox is that the ‘lock in’ which becomes inevitable in a technological world leaves us open to restriction, not liberation. As Lanier explores, technology companies like Apple and Microsoft sell us their wares on a ticket of freedom – but actually we are often being restricted by a lock-in – your iPod to iTunes for example.

This only occurs because of the paradox of our existence. If we were, in Sartre’s language, fully transcendent, we would not be able to be locked in. And if we were fully defined by facticity, we would be locked in already. It’s the paradox of our existence coming into being in the place between facticity and transcendence that means that we are able to be duped by corporations and technologies into thinking that they are making us more free.

For corporations and technologies, read religions and laws. For what is ‘lock in’ other than a codification – an idea reduced to code. And this is precisely what we find in ‘the law’ – the law that is peddled by religions purporting to offer ‘freedom.’

So, and I promise I’ll will get to it in the next post, it’s to this problem of theological lock in, and the effect this has on our person, that we need to reflect on.

[ Lock In [1] ]

In the previous post I raised the idea of technological developments giving rise to ‘lock in.’ Gadgets do not evolve in the organic sense ‘free’ that we might imagine: because of protocols and standardisation (think USB / railway gauges / HTML / Lego) their evolution is guided along particular lines. Other iterations are simply not open to them.

As we have co-evolved with our tools, Jaron Lanier’s thesis in You Are Not A Gadget is that we have experienced a kind of creative ‘lock in’ too: we have begun to see ourselves as gadgets that are restricted to certain forms of expression because our creative tools are themselves locked in.

Sartre explored a similar idea in his work on ‘bad faith.’ Using the pictures of a waiter who acts far too much like a waiter, and a girl who refuses to see that a guy putting his hand on hers is relationally relevant, Sartre outlines two dangers: we either collapse the paradox of our existence into pure facticity, or deny any facticity and consider our lives purely transcendent. As I write in the forthcoming book:

Humans are different from objects in that our consciousness is ‘non self-identifying.’ A table is a table because it fulfils all the properties that we attribute tables as having. But even if we made an infinite list of all the properties of a person, we would never succeed in fully describing their personality. In other words, we aren’t simply human because we do human-like things.

This is why Sartre says the waiter is living in ‘bad faith’ : he is feeling an obligation to display the attributes of a waiter, even though there is nothing that should force him to do so. However, he is also equally critical of the girl because, even though she refuses to be described by the facts of her actions, her transcendent position – positing her hand as something outside of her self – is also a denial of the true situation.

Sartre thus sets up this paradox: we are what we are, but precisely part of our being is that we are not simply what we are.

How does this connect to Lanier’s thesis? As I’ve said, I’ve not yet read the book, and am looking forward to doing so. But picking up from what he’s said in interview, ‘not being a gadget’ is about not being locked into the self-identification that expression-through-tool-use binds us to.

However, what will be interesting to see is if Lanier does conceed that in some ways we are gadgets: there is an element of ‘lock in’ to our humanity, and there is an element of facticity to our person. And it’s to this paradox of being freely locked in that I think sheds light on our theological practice too, which I’ll look at in the next post.

One of my favourite podcasts is Material World – a science review from the BBC. In a recent episode, Jaron Lanier discussed his recently published manifesto: You Are Not A Gadget. I’ve ordered it, but not read it yet, but was very much taken by one line of thought he introduced in the interview – [...]

A little dated now, but still a great video from Knife Party, with polemic text by Barry Mcnamara, outlining one perspective on American militarism. With Gordon Brown giving evidence at the Iraq inquiry today, it seemed resonant, especially the astonishing statistic that the US has been at war with someone around the world at all [...]

Alongside the piece on Alan Turing, I also have another short article in Third Way this month as part of their ‘icon of the month’ series. Following the much-feted launch of the iPad, it’s about Apple.
Apple are an increasingly intriguing company. They are a huge multinational – bigger than Sony or Samsung – yet constantly [...]

Every once in a while something comes along that leaves you with so many questions it’s just impossible to know where to start. The promo video for ‘After The Rapture Pet Care’ is one such thing: (HT the very Darwinian Head of Biology, Mr Simon King )

How does one begin to unpack this? [...]

I’ve a short piece on Alan Turing in this month’s Third Way. If you don’t already subscribe, you should.
One of the key strands of Turing’s thinking was on whether a machine could think like a human. After World War 1, where men had been treated like disposable fighting machines, and World War 2, where millions [...]

I’ve enjoyed seeing Avatar – most recently at a very late night showing at the BFI Imax cinema. It’s not brilliantly plotted or scripted, but a great spectacle nonetheless.
However, I found myself focusing on a problem that 3D cinema has compounded – especially in the immersive environment of Imax. Because the screen is so large, [...]